Layout and Location - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 156

12 months) through the 'windows' of the main trilithon and the
sarsen arches [ 27 ].
Still more recently, a banked processional avenue 10 m wide,
'the first Neolithic road,' has been found leading to the river Avon
from the nearby wooden structure of Durrington Walls, where
there's evidence of vast feasts at midsummer and midwinter. The
structure is oriented to midsummer sunset and midwinter sun-
rise, the opposite of Stonehenge. Where the Stonehenge Avenue
meets the river a 'bluestonehenge' has been discovered, dated to
3000 b.c., so the thought is that people celebrated midwinter at
Durrington Walls, then came along the river and up the Stone-
henge Avenue at sunset, to inter their cremated dead nearby or
even in the Aubrey Holes [ 28 ] (the pits named after John Aubrey,
the Elizabethan diarist who first noticed them, and which Sir Fred
Hoyle thought were an eclipse predictor).
Human cremations were found in the Aubrey Holes in the
1920s, but the excavators scooped them together and dumped them
unexamined in Hole 7. They have now been exhumed for study.
There were 60 burials in all [ 29 ], continuing until 2500 b.c. at least,
and were almost all men, with just one woman among them. They
were healthy apart from arthritis and may have belonged to a royal
dynasty [ 30 ]. But Durrington Walls was occupied for less than 50
years, probably less than 35 years, which supports the alternative
idea that burial in Stonehenge may have been an honor reserved
for its builders [ 28 ] .
It's possible that midwinter events took place as well, but
since they suggest no function for the Heelstone, I'm holding to
my vision of events at midsummer. It's interesting, then, that the
ditch and bank go up the Avenue as if the watchers had to keep off
it (Fig. 5.16 ). When that work was done the Heelstone was already
in place, and it was given its own ditch and bank - so they had to
keep back from that, too. That brings us to why the Heelstone is
displaced from the center line (Fig. 2.4 ) . The answer, perhaps, is
that stones don't officiate at ceremonies - people do. On the spot
at Stonehenge, I found it easy to imagine that the watchers lined
the Avenue, outside the bank, while the leader faced the rising
Sun beside the Heelstone, and his shadow fell back through the
trilithon into the mysterious interior of the circle.